Shortly before my mother died last spring, she made a comment that brought me up short:
“I wish we’d talked about it more,” she said. That was all.
“It” was a defining event in all our lives—the death of my 16-year-old son in a car accident. Concerned about the toll it was taking on her and my dad, my husband and I tried to keep the depths of our pain hidden from them. Even several years after the accident, we didn’t level with them. Our conversations ran along the lines of, “Yeah, it’s really hard, but we’re doing okay.”
That, I see now, was a mistake.
